GREAT CITY, GREAT FESTIVAL

Sunday, May 7---It's been a few years since I was last in San Francisco. The City by the Bay has always held a personal fascination for me. I remember the first time I came here, in 1973, a college boy from New York City, looking for vestiges of the famed Summer of Love. There were still hippies in 1973, and a feeling of intoxicating freedom in the air. I stayed in a crash pad near the corner of Haight and Ashbury, and being so close to that epicenter of cool made me feel quite groovy.

I returned again in 1979 and lived for 2 years right at the foot of Mission Dolores Park. The hippies were mostly gone by then, but the sexual revolution was still in high gear, and San Francisco was a paradise of sexual encounters, home grown marijuana, and a bohemian culture that literally had turned its back on the rest of America, at the dawning of the conservative Reagan 1980's.

Many things changed (and some would say humbled) the city since those halcyon days....the AIDS epidemic, the dot.com boom and bust, the consisent rise in real estate that has made free and easy living a thing of the past. But San Francisco still wears its heart on its sleeve, and for me, there is still the welcoming undercurrent of freedom, individual expression, visual beauty and a healthy questioning of authority. If the "crazies" are said to live in California, their stronghold is this fascinating, diverse, complex and stunningly beautiful (and fantastically livable) city.

To experience San Francisco this time through the prism of the San Francisco International Film Festival, was to be impressed by the sophistication, multi-culturalism and spirit of discovery that continues to be the city's trademarks. Audiences at the films and events I attended were clearly literate film lovers, who were "into" the non-commercial, artistic, exploratory visions of the directors whose films graced the Festival. Even the "stars" who were honored with tributes were an eclectic bunch that included Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, prolific German director Werner Herzog, brilliant screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, and "actor's actor" Ed Harris, all of whom have had unique and highly individualistic careers.

The Festival is, for my money, among the best run and programmatically diverse that I've attended in recent years. To sample its smorgasboard of cinematic delights was to taste the true variety and richness of world cinema, and film's continued ability to move, educate and enlighten its audiences.

But enough about the films, let's talk about the food......dim sum in Chinatown, to-die-for enchiladas in The Mission, fresh catch seafood at the famous Cliff House, piquant sushi at the Japan Center, orgasmic cappuccino in North Beach. San Francisco cuisine gives any other major metropolis a run for its money, and the dining atmosphere can truly not be beat anywhere.

Other non-Festival highlights? The Museum of Modern Art exhibition of photographs from the 1906 Earthquake; long walks in the wilds of Golden Gate Park; the 360-degree view at the top of Pacific Heights; blinding sunlight streaming down on the cafe tables in Union Square; the Herzog and De Meuron re-build of the De Young Museum; and a rare big screen presentation of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (a Saturday afternoon guilty pleasure) in the rarified atmosphere of the impossibly beautiful Castro Theater.

And aside from New York in the shadows and Paris in the rain, is there any other film location as evocative as the San Francisco of Eric Von Stroheim's GREED, Hitchcock's VERTIGO, Richard Lester's PETULIA, Peter Yates' BULLIT and Don Siegel's DIRTY HARRY.

In a city that is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its near devastation in the 1906 earthquake, the pioneering spirit of re-birth and re-building is present, not only in its famous hilltops and diverse neighborhoods, but at the Festival that bears its name, the oldest in North America. A walking city. A thinking city. A special city. Great city, great festival.